Topic: a model request station?

[flowrellik]

Hello everyone! My name is Flowrellik and I've been a fan of the sfc series, along with Bridge commander and Klingon Academy.
I come here in hopes of reigniting my passion for SFC and hopefully even mod it like in the past. Sadly since Battleclinic died out I was wondering if there was any way of requesting long dead ships that were only from there? One ship in particular was a Romulanized B'rel class (I believe it was either S-11 or V-24. It was a FASA type).

[Panzergranate]

I have the FASA L-24 "Little Killer" in my SFC 1 library, is that anything like the V-24??

It's not one of my models though, rather a download. I've added a few FASA models of my own, over the years, when I couldn't find any to download for a particular ship.

The L-24 made for a damned good long range commerce raider in our old LAN campaign games, a few years ago. It easily overwhelmed escorting corvettes, sloops and Q-ships which forced the other team to deploy precious destroyers and light cruisers as convoy escorts, taking them away from other theatres.

Do you have a picture of the V-24??

 

[flowrellik]

The model I remember seeing is P81's Brel model with Atrahasis's TMP Romulan textures on it, giving it a romulan approach as it originally had. I had it at one time but sadly lost it in a hard drive failure...
I'm also on the hunt for a few other model series which I believe was released in the past.
-FOAS's Mirak fleet (I recall before robinomicon had just the Rommies/Klings/TOSTMP Feds there was actually more to them.
-Firesoul's collection of ships (Dead links)

[Panzergranate]

I'll have to look to see if I downloaded it. If it was SFC 2 it might be in my "to covert to SFC 1" backlog as I convert the models between the games, which takes time and patience.

Converting the mesh isn't the problem, it's successfully re-attaching the SFC 2 aligned textures onto the now SFC 1 mesh that's the issue, depending on what 3D modelling package the original was created in.

[d4v1ks]

Converting the mesh isn't the problem, it's successfully re-attaching the SFC 2 aligned textures onto the now SFC 1 mesh that's the issue, depending on what 3D modelling package the original was created in.

I don't understand the dificulty in converting a model between SFC versions.
The internal structure of all models is the same.
You can see that when you convert a model into an OBJ file using the "Model Browser".
There i just dump the data as it is in the models.
A conversion from sfc2 to sfc1 only take 1-2 minuts using a notepad after you dump them into an OBJ file. You are 100% assured to preserve the data as it was under the MOD format, including the textures coordinates. No bit of data is lost.

[Panzergranate]

I use MFCSFCED for all my ship modelling which doesn't do OBJ files, only MOD files. This includes making new meshes from scratch. It does the job fine, it was free and I don't like spending money unnecessarily. (I'm half Yorkshire on my mother's side).

Here's the conversion process I use. It's not meant for this purpose but neither are hammers designed to drive in screws, but you can still hammer them into wood.

I have to load and highlight the mesh for the SFC 2 model.

Copy and export it.

Load any SFC 1 model of comparable size.

Import the SFC 2 mesh copy.

Delete the original host SFC 1 model.

Highlight the imported mesh.

Move the imported mesh down to the positioning markers.

If the hard and damage points haven't been done on the original SFC 2 model, spend the time putting them in. Not everybody does the hard and damage points. Normally these carry across if they're done.

Save the new SFC 1 mesh to a new folder and file.

This gives me a playable mesh in SFC 1 at least.

Copy the skins, text file and stuff to the new folder for the SFC 1 version of the model.

Next I have to carry over the skins. Some attach automatically, some can be a pain and have to be completely attached as for a new model. It seems to depend who made the model. No trouble with Mudd's, Models Pleases's or Atrashasis' so far. Others I can spend hours with with some meshes (usually red ones) refusing to receive all the skins. One, a Gem Hadar fighter, has the main hull unskinned mesh red with the warp engines and everything else skinned just fine.

Only on models with red meshes does this occur. The funny thing is it looks fine in Model Viewer, just not in the actual SFC 1 game.

Other options are to make LOD layer versions of the new model withless detail by copying it and trimming away the polys, but only really needed on uber detailed very large models likely to be run in large ship numbers / players LAN games and on some of the slower computers here.

usually I don't bother.

Break models cannot be converted or created by MFCSFCED so I don't use them, preferring the default explosion to show that they've been destroyed in a game.

[d4v1ks]

I use MFCSFCED for all my ship modelling which doesn't do OBJ files, only MOD files.

Oh, but my model browser also converts the OBJ back to MOD.
That is why i said it was easy to convert from sfc2 to sfc1, because the only difference is that sfc1 doesn't use luminance textures.
The remove the luminance textures from the MTL file, after you convert it into an OBJ, you just need to delete a line per material.
Then you import it back to MOD.

[Panzergranate]

Running an unconverted SFC 2 or SFC 2 OP model in a SFC 1 game will cause (A) the model not to appear, just its location tag and (B) the game to immediately crash the moment a weapon scores a hit on where the model is supposed to exist or if a beam weapon is fired from the model's supposed location.

Based on this observation, it appears that the incompatibilty issue is the way in which the hard point locations are encripted into a model and how the two games interpret this.

[d4v1ks]

Running an unconverted SFC 2 or SFC 2 OP model in a SFC 1 game will cause (A) the model not to appear, just its location tag and (B) the game to immediately crash the moment a weapon scores a hit on where the model is supposed to exist

Like i said the only difference between the 2 versions is the luminance textures.
The video bellow is an example of what i was talking about.

[Don Karnage]

I have mod for the game, but so many that I can't name them ^^

Well BG here have what I have since he's the one who made cds for me.

So if you are looking for a model I will need to know is in what era, TOS, TMP, and what race so I can narrow the search.

[Bernard Guignard]

Your are looking for Atrahasis's Romulan S-11

[flowrellik]

That's the BOP! Thanks Bernard!

[Bernard Guignard]

No Problem Glad to help out